PC: A totalitarian state run by a group

Could a totalitarian state be run by a group? Some sort of council or committee where no one individual holds all the power? Or is the notion of one man with all the power absolutely essential to a totalitarian government?

The situation I'm imagining is analogous to this: the Axis wins a minor victory in WW2 but Nazi Germany continues to exist. Around 1948-1950 Hitler dies. No one can ever really succeed the Führer -- the Führer, after all, was sent by Providence and there will never be another like him. There are rivalries among the elite, and no one person can secure power, so they decide to share it.

That's not the only scenario, just an example.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Could a totalitarian state be run by a group? Some sort of council or committee where no one individual holds all the power?
Say, a political party, or perhaps some sort of a political bureau or a central committee?

The situation I'm imagining is analogous to this: the Axis wins a minor victory in WW2 but Nazi Germany continues to exist. Around 1948-1950 Hitler dies. No one can ever really succeed the Führer -- the Führer, after all, was sent by Providence and there will never be another like him. There are rivalries among the elite, and no one person can secure power, so they decide to share it.
This was basically the Soviet Union after Khrushchev in the 60s-70s where power were held by a cliche of people close to Brezhnev and the 5 years or so immediately after Lenin's incapacitate before Stalin took over
 
Could a totalitarian state be run by a group? Some sort of council or committee where no one individual holds all the power?

Sure. The USSR was not really a personal dictatorship for much of its history before and after Stalin; even Lenin was occasionally outvoted in the Politburo.
 
Any state is more likely going a public leader. Now how much power that leader may have could very. It could be interesting to imagine a fascist state instead of a communist one being run by a group behind the public eye. Would make a good novel.
 
People keep talking about a hypothetical Police state, but they never explain how to keep Sting from eventually going solo. :cool::openedeyewink:
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Isn't this what China was from Deng Xiaoping onwards? You can argue that Xi Jinping is trying to turn China from a a party dictatorship to a one-man dictatorship, but that discussion belongs in Chat.
 
Could a totalitarian state be run by a group? Some sort of council or committee where no one individual holds all the power? Or is the notion of one man with all the power absolutely essential to a totalitarian government?

The situation I'm imagining is analogous to this: the Axis wins a minor victory in WW2 but Nazi Germany continues to exist. Around 1948-1950 Hitler dies. No one can ever really succeed the Führer -- the Führer, after all, was sent by Providence and there will never be another like him. There are rivalries among the elite, and no one person can secure power, so they decide to share it.

That's not the only scenario, just an example.
Maybe a Zapatist dictatorship ?
 
Sure. The USSR was not really a personal dictatorship for much of its history before and after Stalin; even Lenin was occasionally outvoted in the Politburo.

This. Even in Cambodia though we Westerners talk about Pol Pot to personalize the process, just as invocation of Hitler automatically signifies the Nazi genocides, the Angkar was exactly what that word means in Khmer -- "the Organization." There was very often a pattern of collective decision-making within that small clique at the top (small enough to populate a kindergarten class, it's part of why the Vietnamese succeeded fairly quickly in the 1978-79 invasion, if you displaced or panicked the keystone at the top the whole thing crumbled fast.) Pol Pot was actually displaced for a period of time in 1976 but the Killing Fields chuntered on because that was a group project of the leadership. Pol just had enough ego that he wanted to be the front man to the Chinese and so, in our Western world of singular elected executives (even the primus inter pares ones in parliamentary systems) he became "the leader" in foreign eyes when it was more complicated than that on the ground. Ieng Sary and his wife did as much as anyone in the Angkar to drive the genocide but if you bring them up to most folks outside SE Asia the response is, "who?" Not, frankly, unlike dropping names like Bukharin or Podgorny to poli sci undergrads.
 

samcster94

Banned
This. Even in Cambodia though we Westerners talk about Pol Pot to personalize the process, just as invocation of Hitler automatically signifies the Nazi genocides, the Angkar was exactly what that word means in Khmer -- "the Organization." There was very often a pattern of collective decision-making within that small clique at the top (small enough to populate a kindergarten class, it's part of why the Vietnamese succeeded fairly quickly in the 1978-79 invasion, if you displaced or panicked the keystone at the top the whole thing crumbled fast.) Pol Pot was actually displaced for a period of time in 1976 but the Killing Fields chuntered on because that was a group project of the leadership. Pol just had enough ego that he wanted to be the front man to the Chinese and so, in our Western world of singular elected executives (even the primus inter pares ones in parliamentary systems) he became "the leader" in foreign eyes when it was more complicated than that on the ground. Ieng Sary and his wife did as much as anyone in the Angkar to drive the genocide but if you bring them up to most folks outside SE Asia the response is, "who?" Not, frankly, unlike dropping names like Bukharin or Podgorny to poli sci undergrads.
The same stuff happened under Mao in China(where his wife had a lot of power at times, as did several other people).
 
The same stuff happened under Mao in China(where his wife had a lot of power at times, as did several other people).
Exactly. And afterwards Deng, who was one of the best players of the game Autocracy in the 20th century, knew that gathering the party elders around him in a collective structure was the best way to play their egos off one another and prevent any one of them from becoming powerful enough to challenge Deng's position as first among equals. That meant giving them enough real power over decisions to stay invested so they wouldn't knock Deng off his perch, which made the state just collective enough for Deng's purposes. So even when you have a leader, they turn out not to be a Franco-American style unitary executive. The other players don't just have influence, they have constitutionally legitimate powers. So it was in Moscow until at least '74 or so when Brezhnev finally felt secure enough to sideline Kosygin and start putting Podgorny out to pasture (but not yet; if Brezhnev had died of his '76 heart attack -- or was it a stroke? -- Podgorny still had enough authority and enough proteges to be a player in the succession.)
 

samcster94

Banned
Exactly. And afterwards Deng, who was one of the best players of the game Autocracy in the 20th century, knew that gathering the party elders around him in a collective structure was the best way to play their egos off one another and prevent any one of them from becoming powerful enough to challenge Deng's position as first among equals. That meant giving them enough real power over decisions to stay invested so they wouldn't knock Deng off his perch, which made the state just collective enough for Deng's purposes. So even when you have a leader, they turn out not to be a Franco-American style unitary executive. The other players don't just have influence, they have constitutionally legitimate powers. So it was in Moscow until at least '74 or so when Brezhnev finally felt secure enough to sideline Kosygin and start putting Podgorny out to pasture (but not yet; if Brezhnev had died of his '76 heart attack -- or was it a stroke? -- Podgorny still had enough authority and enough proteges to be a player in the succession.)
That would have changed or definitely Afghanistan plans in Russia if he died early. Unitary Executives are rare in democracies(a full Presidential is only common in Latin America, and Romania is one of the only other countries to copy French style Semi-Presidentialism without falling into dictatorship).
 
I like the examples the others brought up, and even under Hitler, the local satraps had remarkable powers, but I think Nazi Germany would be a bad example to this trope overall, as the whole point of the thing was to have a supreme ruler from whom all power flowed. So the Council concept would not fly that much in Nazi Germany, and Nazi Germany only. Everywhere else, sure.

I spent some bandwidth on this concept in other posts not that long ago, but the remarkable (perhaps poor choice of word there, but hear me out) aspect of Nazi Germany wasn't that it had an ideology, it was that it's ideology was Hitlerism, he who is closest to Hitler gets to have power, regardless of their title. If in the Soviet Union, China and Musso-'s Italy the title of a man was a marker of power and statement what that man could be allowed to do and the scope of their fiefdom, in Nazi Germany titles meant almost close to nothing despite the preponderance of them. Even positions in department meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, as the men closest to Hitler could expand their fiefdoms with his blessing without ever changing their titles. I mean, yes, you had Old School Prussians such as Goering who took on titles with aplomb to signal his responsibilities, but you also had a parade of SS and Nazi Party official shit-heels who quietly did whatever they wanted and appropriated powers that were never granted to them, but could do it because Hitler approved of them.

This is by no means a unique 20th or 21st century phenom, as you tend to see this kind of thing in mismanaged companies all over the world today as well (I know quite a few banks where the gal with a humble "team manager" title who takes cigarette breaks with the CEO has more power than a clutch of VPs and Directors).

The other thing to remember is that a lot of the Type A dictators had no idea the degree they were manipulated by the alleged executors of their will. As it was in their nature to assume that their underlings were instruments of their vision rather than real human beings with desires and crabbed and petty visions of their own. So the vision of the dictator whose every utterance moves mountains is fiction best left to the Greek myths.

The Soviet Union is probably the best (known to me) examples of post-Stalinist collective decision making. Everyone kinda agreed what the big "vision" thing was and concentrated on A) not being the idiots who f' it all up and lose the fight against Capitalism, B) maintain control of an empire, C) retain powers within the chief kingdom of the empire.

Brezhnev's last decade in power is a glorious example of a police state where the police did not quite understand what it meant to police or define state but kept up appearances.
 

Marc

Donor
Essentially, I believe what you all are talking about are oligarchies (rule of the few). One could argue that oligarchy has been and still is the historical norm if you consider few to be a small minority, i.e. the ruling elite. It can be as obvious as the former Soviet Politburo, the Roman Senate of antiquity, the "Hundred" various families that have historically run most Latin American countries. Or more subtle: the people in charge come from the right schools, have the backing of the economically and culturally powerful, etc. One person rule - as in concentrated power in one fist - or real popular democracy, tend to be the outlier states. Even now, even in the West.
 
I'm surprised no one brought up Imperial Japan from 1940 to 1945; at that time it was ruled by a junta of ultrantionalist ultramilitarist officers that had a name for it, the Taisei Yokusankai. Granted their influence on the government began in 1932 but it was in 1940 that the group became more "cohesive" and got said name to rubber stamp their rule and of course the Japanese Emperor served as the figurehead, even though Tojo Hideki, one of the officers in question, is the de jure leader of the group.
 
I'm surprised no one brought up Imperial Japan from 1940 to 1945; at that time it was ruled by a junta of ultrantionalist ultramilitarist officers that had a name for it, the Taisei Yokusankai. Granted their influence on the government began in 1932 but it was in 1940 that the group became more "cohesive" and got said name to rubber stamp their rule and of course the Japanese Emperor served as the figurehead, even though Tojo Hideki, one of the officers in question, is the de jure leader of the group.
I mean Tojo wasn't even PM during the whole TY period.
 
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